Prebuilt Zotac EN980

[IntoxicatedPuma]

I guess this will be on the news part soon, but till then......

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/zotac-releases-magnus-en980-mini-pc.html

I think the en970 was pretty cool, I'm super interested to see the "custom liquid cooling" setup they have for this. I guess it will be the GTX 980 desktop on mobile or whatever they call it? Hopefully it has a LGA socket CPU instead of the mobile version

 

[Tek Everything]

I have been a fan of these Zotac systems for some time now. The dual core CPUs they use are a deal breaker for me... but they would make for a great living room PC.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

I think the NEN steam box trades one of the 2.5 drives for a LGA socketed CPU. I wonder if the 980 will do that. It says it comes with an i5, so it seems like an i5 6200U would really gimp a desktop GTX 980.

 

[Tek Everything]

Agreed, I guess we will just have to wait and see

 

[iFreilicht]

I really like their 970(M) units, too, they are just so small it's incomprehensible, and I guess this one will make no difference, thought it'll probably be a bit larger than the 970s.
Not sure how much sense watercooling makes in such a small amount of space, but I guess they had their reasons. What I'm very reluctant to believe is that this system will be whisper quiet at full tilt. And I'd really like to know whether and by how much they throttle the 980.

 

[EdZ]

More photos here. Looks to be 2x/3x the height of the EN970, and interestingly has "Water Cooling Mini PC" emblazoned on the front (which admittedly could just be marketing speak for "it has a heatpipe in there somewhere").

 

[iFreilicht]

Whoops, that's a lot larger than I expected. Well the press release is talking about heatpipes and watercooling, so there should be some kind of loop in there.

 

[Phuncz]

Two DC-IN inputs, that's something I didn't expect.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

I think the Asus GR8 also has two inputs...or maybe I am thinking another one. I guess it sounds picky but I think it's a lie with these ultra SFF cases when they don't include the power bricks in the volume. I know they are becoming smaller but I still prefer everything packed into a single box.

 

[iFreilicht]

It's the G20, the GR8 only has a single DC input. The funny thing is that the G20 would actually be large enough to fit a PSU on the inside, but they had to place the ODD directly in the middle for aesthetic reasons. You could probably still fit a FlexATX above the mainboard, there's so much wasted space in that system.

Two DC inputs are an immediate deal-breaker for me. I'm starting to think that a single power brick is kind of ok, it offers actual benefits, even if it's cheating in terms of volume.

 

[Hahutzy]

Personally I think a UCFF and water cooling don't go well together in terms of usability.

I want a UCFF over a bigger PC because I want to travel around with it and bring in my carry-on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the liquid loop (even if we all know it's just pure H2O) isn't going to get past the airport security.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

And I would be worried the change in pressure could cause a burst or leak if in luggage. I didn't bring a closed loop cooler with me to China because of that.

 

[EdZ]

Closed loop AIOs are perfectly fine for flight. They can be shipped in unpressurised air-freight after all.

 

[CC Ricers]

Any idea whether it this is active or passive liquid cooling though? Because it does mention liquid channels and heatpipes so it could be more passive as opposed to being a 'traditional' active cooling solution.

 

[QinX]

On Hardware.info (Dutch) they have a small blurp about the EN980
http://nl.hardware.info/nieuws/4728...e-skylake-mini-pc-en-computer-stick-bij-zotac

Quick translation:
And finally the ZBox EN 980, a watercooled gaming barebone. This is a prototype unit of which it is not clear if it will hit retail. In the small case Zotac has managed to build a GTX 980 that has access to 4GB of GDDR5. an Intel Core i5 6400T is the CPU at a frequency of 2.7 GHz. There is room for one 2.5", one M.2 SSD and up to 16GB of SO-DIMM RAM is supported. 802.11ac WiFi is also present and 2 times Gigabit. other connectors are:
2x DP, 2x HDMI, 4x USB3.0, 1x USB 3.1 Type-C

 

[Tek Everything]

Those specs are disappointing. It is rather large, and ugly imho. Pricing would have to be fairly aggressive to make this worth purchasing.

 

[Phuncz]

If this is really big as it looks (~10L), I'm suspecting this is because of the watercooling. To me, watercooling is still not the defacto cooling solution, especially for SFF. While a radiator is just a heatsink with piping running through it, the pump and tubing need a considerable amount of volume which is hard to stuff in a corner. It shouldn't be used as a better cooling option, but it does need to fit the build and case. I don't feel this product is a good fit for watercooling.

Or they could have pulled a Samsung and call a heatpipe in a phone a watercooled phone.

 

[QinX]

Well if you look at how AMD Quantum and my H2O-Micro are made then you would guess that doing a production version of such a design should be smaller than what you see in boutique or custom systems just because you have fixed locations and hardware to work with.

But yeah looking at the IO it doesn't look very small.

Also Microsoft did that watercooled phone first with the Lumia 950 and they called it liquid cooling, which isn't technically wrong.

 

[CC Ricers]

It sure is a lot bigger than the Magnus Z Boxes that's for sure. Given those specs, you could likely get it down to close that size, if not exactly that size, if no water cooling was an option.

 

[Phuncz]

Also Microsoft did that watercooled phone first with the Lumia 950 and they called it liquid cooling, which isn't technically wrong.

Technically it's passive cooling in combination with a heatpipe, since the liquid doesn't diffuse the heat but just moves it to another side, the copper and aluminium cools passively. But then we could also consider water-cooling as air-cooling in combination with a fluid heat transport system, since it's not the water that does the cooling, but the air dissipating the heat from the radiator.

But that's enough wise-ass'ing from me. This might be a nice package but I'm worried about the lack of ventilation, the two power supplies and the roughly 200W TDP that this will probably produce. Most of these tiny boxes from ZOTAC and Gigabyte with dGPUs have had issues with noise, while their only use case seems to be as a living room PC, where you'd want it to be quiet.